


And we are here as on a darkling plain

by lunabee34 (Lorraine)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Daddy Issues, Death, Dysfunctional Family, Episode Tag, Episode: s05e10 Abandon All Hope..., Families of Choice, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Mother-Daughter Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-08
Updated: 2013-06-08
Packaged: 2017-12-14 08:14:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/834667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lorraine/pseuds/lunabee34
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three vignettes from Gabriel, Dean, and Ellen's perspectives; spoilers for "Abandon All Hope."</p>
            </blockquote>





	And we are here as on a darkling plain

  
_Ah, love, let us be true_  
 _To one another! for the world, which seems_  
 _To lie before us like a land of dreams,_  
 _So various, so beautiful, so new,_  
 _Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,_  
 _Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;_  
 _And we are here as on a darkling plain_  
 _Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,_  
 _Where ignorant armies clash by night._

Matthew Arnold  
"Dover Beach"

I  
Gabriel likes the human words for things—the very tangible shapes of them in his mouth, the physicality of moving air through his diaphragm and across his vocal chords, the utter corporeality of human speech. Angels in their native forms do not speak to each other, not through any means that humans would recognize as language, and so Gabriel is glad that his last official action on the clock was to deliver a PSA to a young virgin of the House of David. It was always such a pleasure to embody the Word of the Lord. After Gabriel dropped the bombshell on Mary, he folded his wings tightly to his back and settled down into the body he was wearing. “I’m going to Stanford. I’m really leaving, Dad,” Gabriel might have said back then if he’d known the words.

Since that day, he’s been Coyote and Loki and Anansi all in turn. Gabriel didn’t invent these personae; humans are so wonderfully creative, so much like their Father in that regard. They are never as close to the Divine as when they tell stories. It suits Gabriel’s purpose to pose as a Trickster, and he guesses after all these centuries, he isn’t posing any longer. He is as much Trickster as he ever was angel.

He thought, all those long centuries ago, that he’d found the secret. He didn’t have to rip out his grace, didn’t have to Fall to live a real life, to truly feel. Now Gabriel stands in a dwindling ring of fire, that holy flame that binds him for a time, and he knows the joke’s finally, finally on him.

You run away because you want to be chased, simple as that. You slam a door so Someone can open it again. You hide because you want to be found. Life—this pitiful, messy, beautiful thing the humans cling to so desperately—it’s about letting go in the hope that those you love reach out again and hold on all the more tightly for your loss.

Gabriel waited for years to hear his Father’s voice. He waited to be punished. He waited for the pain that meant God still gave a shit about his prodigal son. That he ever gave a shit. Gabriel stopped waiting a long time ago.

“Why have you forsaken me?” Gabriel cries, and he knows he’s stealing another man’s line, but it’s a good one. He falls to his knees on the wet cement. “Why?”

No one answers.

 

II  
“This is our last night on Earth,” Cas says, and all Dean can see for ten minutes after the picture snaps are red and green flares where everyone’s faces should be.

When he was a boy, Dean thought his dad was always running to something—a job, an answer, a family that needed saving. That’s what a Winchester does, who a Winchester is: come hell or high water, to run into the thick of things, to look evil smack dab in the face and hold ground.

Looking back, Dean can see his dad was only running from.

Cas’s doom and gloom aside, everybody perks up when Bobby fires up the grill. “Keep your hands off my meat, boy,” he hollers when Dean tries to flip the sirloins, and Sam laughs until beer froths from his nose.

“I do not understand,” Cas says. “Why are you all laughing?”

Ellen hands him a peeler and a colander full of potatoes. “You’ll understand when you’re older.”

That night around the table, Bobby tells stories that make even Cas chuckle. They eat every last damn bite of everything—steak and french fries and the salad Dean bitches about but secretly enjoys if only because ranch dressing is awesome. Sam grins like he used to when they were kids, and Ellen knocks Dean down a peg every third sentence, and in the warm glow of a sixty watt bulb, Jo is the most beautiful woman Dean has ever seen.

Maybe Cas is right. Maybe tonight is the last night Dean has left, and if that’s true, Dean is sure as hell glad he's spent it running to. 

 

III  
The day they burned Bill, Ellen washed two loads of dishes, put the mortgage check on the Roadhouse in the mail, and packed all of her dead husband’s clothes neatly into boxes to take to Goodwill. So it’s not that she can’t go on living, after. That’s not why she stays with Jo.

Ellen knows if she leaves this place breathing, first chance she gets she’ll be scrabbling on her knees in the mud where the roads converge. She can almost taste that kiss—cold and rot and the sweet, sweet promise of Jo whole again. But that’s a hell of thing to lay on your child, a hell of a cycle to set in motion. Ellen saw how heavy their daddy’s choice weighed on his boys. Most selfish thing John Winchester ever did, that deal, and the only thing he did that Ellen truly understands.

“That’s my good girl,” Ellen says and holds her broken baby girl as she hits the detonator. Ellen is grateful that when the world burns down around her, she can still feel Jo’s body in her arms.

When she opens her eyes, Ellen is behind the bar at the Roadhouse, and a girl she doesn’t know is bellied up on a stool and drinking a pint of stout. The girl looks a lot like Jo—blonde, dark eyes, skinny little wrists—and Ellen guesses she means to. “Don’t be her,” Ellen says. “I know what you are. Don’t look like her.”

The stranger nods, and then she sheds that girl-skin, peels it right off and drifts out of the lie. There’s a terrifying kind of rightness to a Reaper, Ellen decides, that is perversely easier to look at than the humans it pretends to be. It’s brutal, the naked face of death, but at least it’s honest. 

“You must go now,” the Reaper says, and Ellen can see some kind of light in the distance—pale, diffuse, the blurred edges of the moon in the wet summer sky.

Ellen jerks her chin at the light. “Where’s it go? Will Jo be there?” Her voice cracks on her daughter’s name. She didn’t know the word would hurt as much in her mouth as it does in her heart.

The Reaper hovers in front of her, its expression indecipherable. “I don’t want to ruin the surprise.”

“Bullshit,” Ellen says. “You don’t have a goddamn clue.” Figures.

The Reaper is silent for a long time, time enough for Ellen to wonder what happens when a Reaper gets angry, and then it speaks. “No, I don’t know what awaits you on the other side, Ellen Harvelle. You are the first I’ve admitted that to in many years. But I have faith that there is something else, something more. Otherwise, why do I exist? What am I here for?”

Ellen looks at that floating death’s head, the nightmare of its robes that move in the absence of wind. “Did my death even matter? Did Jo’s death mean something?” Ellen says. 

“Death is never meaningless, but Lucifer still walks.”

That hurts much less than Ellen expects. Five humans and a renegade angel against the Prince of Darkness. Some army. She knew how those odds stacked up when Dean laid the Colt on Bobby’s table. Jo knew, too. Killing the devil was a shot in the dark, always, and Ellen can’t be sorry they tried.

“It’s a limited time offer, Ellen. The light won’t wait for you forever.”

People say your life rewinds before your eyes when you die, but all Ellen can see is Jo. Maybe that’s the same thing. She sees

_tiny Joanna Beth with a Kool-Aid mouth hanging off her daddy’s bicep. “Don’t drop me!” she squeals, and Bill says, “I got you, JoJo. I got you.”_

and

_Jo with scabs on her knees and bruises on her shins throwing Bill’s knife over and over until she can hit the knot on the old oak dead center from the back porch_

and

_Jo pissed, yelling, with her hands on her hips and her hair in her face. “You can’t stop me,” she says._

_“You’re not ready,” Ellen says, but what she means is I’m not ready, I’m not ready, I’ll never be ready._

and

_Jo’s blood is more on the outside than in. Ellen is stained to the elbows with it. “This might literally be your last chance to treat me like an adult,” Jo says, and that’s her girl, smartass down to the wire._

So, yeah. Ellen guesses she knows a little bit about faith. She grabs onto what she can remember of her daughter, and she locks it up solid in her heart, and then she steps into the light.

 

IV  
Ellen opens her eyes.


End file.
